


Inadequate Materials

by flyingthesky



Series: Banned Together 2020 [3]
Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: (it just be like that), Banned Together Bingo, California, College, Gen, Original Character-centric, Original Statement (The Magnus Archives), Spontaneous Combustion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-14
Updated: 2021-01-14
Packaged: 2021-03-12 11:29:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,642
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28759605
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/flyingthesky/pseuds/flyingthesky
Summary: Statement of Yazmina Schwartz, regarding the strange circumstances surrounding the completion of her thesis at California State University, Bakersfield.
Series: Banned Together 2020 [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1760965
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4
Collections: Banned Together Bingo 2020





	Inadequate Materials

**Author's Note:**

> for [banned together bingo](https://bannedtogetherbingo2020.tumblr.com/), specifically the “local town heard you talking shit” square, with deepest apologies to jonny sims. actually no, i take that back. this is exactly what he deserves.

ARCHIVIST

Statement of Yazmina Schwartz, regarding the strange circumstances surrounding the completion of her thesis at California State University, Bakersfield. Original statement given July 25, 1991. Audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London.

Statement begins.

ARCHIVIST (STATEMENT)

This is going to sound so stupid, because it _is_ stupid and I didn’t even want to come here, but Leyla says this is exactly the sort of thing you guys investigate. You know Leyla, right? She works here as an intern.

I’m sorry, this is all wrong. I should start at the beginning: my name is Yazmina Schwartz, and I majored in sociology, which is why I studied overseas in America. I could have gone to quite a few of different schools, but I thought California would be a fun place to live. When I was looking for schools I applied all over, but I applied to a bunch of universities in California and eventually I ended up at CSU Bakersfield. It’s a decent school, all things considered, but Bakersfield wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I was picturing going to college in California. Turns out California is one and a half times larger than the whole of the UK and there are lot more places in it than just Los Angeles and San Francisco, even if I didn’t know it at the time.

Bakersfield is located in Kern County, which mostly consists of lower middle-class working families. It’s a bit like Leicester or Stoke-on-Trent, yeah? Actually, Kern County is rather infamous in America for what might be classed as unfortunate reasons. Do you know the novel _The Grapes of Wrath_? It’s set in Kern County, which they took quite a lot of offence to, given how it’s portrayed. They actually banned the book for a year and a half, if you can believe that, and I’m under the impression they still aren’t terribly fond of it, given what I’m about to tell you.

Please understand that I know that seems unrelated, but it isn’t. You need to know all of this so you understand what I’m about to say next. You _must_ understand that everything I’m about to say only happened because I was in Kern County when I tried to do my sociology thesis on the cultural impact of banning books through the lens of _The Grapes of Wrath_. It seemed convenient, at the time. I’d read the book in sixth form and when I realized that I could, perhaps, do some “on location” research, then that seemed like it would be the perfect vehicle for my thesis. It’s one of the most famous cases of banned literature, after all.

I was wrong.

At first, of course, I thought it was a funny coincidence. The books I wanted for reference were always checked out of the library or loaned to other branches. The school library told me they lost the first copy of the book I wanted in the mail and it would take a few weeks to replace it. You know, it just seemed like little things that would happen to anybody at first. I thought I was just having a terrible run of it until I went to the local bookshop and couldn’t find a copy of _The Grapes of Wrath_. There wasn’t even a space for it, which struck me as weird, but maybe it was shelved in a different section? It wasn’t.

The lady at the till told me they didn’t carry the book. Imagine if a Waterstone’s didn’t carry a single copy of _Pride and Prejudice_! The statement alone was absurd, but when I asked if they could order it? She said no, which is downright inconceivable. It’s not some rare, out-of-print book, and I didn’t even need a specific edition. I just needed a copy, _any_ copy to reference, and I was becoming tired of not being able to work on my thesis without one. I called a shop in Lancaster, which is a town near Bakersfield, and asked if _they_ could get me a copy. Of course, they said _yes_. I tagged along with a friend who was going to Lancaster for unrelated business, picked up my book, and it seemed like everything was going to be fine for a while.

We were just driving back. I swear, I was only flipping through the book on the car ride back when it burst into flames as we crossed back over into Bakersfield. Throwing it out of the window wasn’t the best choice, but I panicked. What would you do if the book you were holding was suddenly on fire? I didn’t want to set the car on fire.

Of course we had to stop the car because California is quite dry and I didn’t want to start a forest fire by throwing a flaming book out the window. That’s only polite, we thought. Only when we went looking along the side of the road for it, we couldn’t find it. I guess that’s not so strange, but it made the whole thing feel very unreal. Needless to say, I didn’t attempt to get another copy for a few weeks. I made do with research into other areas, even though getting my hands on the books I needed for that research involved travelling to other unis.

I tried getting the books I needed through the inter-uni loan system, of course. No sense in travelling if you don’t have to—everything in America is so far apart, you know? They regularly drive for four hours to get places, and that’s a short trip! But that doesn’t matter, the point is I wasn’t able to get any of the books I needed that way.

Not a single book I needed would ever show up at my uni’s library. I’d had some of them on hold for _weeks_ , you know? That was strange enough the librarian commented on it when I went for my daily check of if they’d come in. Turns out the system used to process inter-uni book loans had deleted all my requests. So we put them in again. I watched as the librarian called.

Those books never arrived. The other unis swore that they sent them over, but I never saw a single one of those books. Later I learned that several of them were marked “return to sender,” as if they couldn’t be delivered to my uni because it didn’t exist. 

I got another copy of _Grapes of Wrath_. It doesn’t matter how, not really, the point is as soon as I entered Kern county the book burst into flames. I managed to put it out this time, but it was unreadable. This time I kept the book. Well, I tried, at any rate. I’m not sure what possessed me to keep it, maybe superstition? Perhaps it was a bad omen, but within the week it had disappeared from my bag along with many of my notes for my thesis. I never let that bag out of my sight except for when I slept. You understand the impulse, don’t you? With everything I’ve already explained? My friends thought I was crazy. Maybe you will too.

At this point, I was at a loss. I couldn’t change my thesis topic, not with how much preliminary work I’d done and the whole thing locked in. Well, maybe they would have let me under the circumstances, but I was determined. Thankfully I kept multiple copies of my work, but the whole thing was beginning to depress me. After the third copy I lost to fire—this time of the entire building I was staying in—I almost gave up. Actually, I would have given up had it not all stopped.

Because our building was unlivable, the owners put us up in a hotel in nearby Lancaster until they could sort the situation out. I have no idea why it was so out of the way, but I assume there must have been a reason. Whatever it was, I’m glad of it. Once I was doing my research in Lancaster, whatever spell Kern county must have over it no longer controlled me. I was able to submit my fully finished thesis with no further problems.

I would have never come to write this statement if it weren’t for the letter I received last week, however. They’ve lost the copy of my thesis on file in what appears to be an act of arson. Probably a prank gone wrong, they said.

Perhaps I’d believe them, if not for everything else.

ARCHIVIST

Statement ends.

I’m not sure how much can be added here. The more factual aspects of Mrs. Schwartz’s statement seem to be accurate. _The Grapes of Wrath_ was indeed banned in Kern county for a time, and Mrs. Schwartz did receive a degree from California State University, Bakersfield in sociology. Her thesis is not on file, although the current librarian could tell me nothing about the supposed arson that destroyed it. They appear to have no record of such an event.

Tim managed to track Mrs. Schwartz down, now a respected Professor of Sociology at UCL. She stood by the statement she made and offered the letter detailing the supposed arson attack. It appears to be on official letterhead, although that’s easy enough to fake even within the time frame these events occurred. She also offered a digital copy of the thesis at the core of this story.

It’s a fascinating read, although it did bring up something that Mrs. Schwartz did not think to disclose or perhaps didn’t know at the time of her statement. The year she was completing her thesis, 1990, was the fiftieth anniversary of _The Grapes of Wrath_ ’s publication. One wonders if that had anything to do with the events in her statement.

End recording.


End file.
